3. Role Allocation - education allocates people to their most appropriate job - everyone has the chance to achieve what they want if they work hard MERITOCRACY.

Criticisms - fail to recognize diversity of values, and how beliefs of the upper classes are transmitted through the educational system. Myth of meritocracy - does talent = occupation?

1 of 6

Every Child Matters (2004)

The department of education set out a national framework, where schools are required to work towards child having the support they need to:

be healthy

stay safe

enjoy and achieve

make a positive contribution

achieve economic wellbeing

How would each of the sociological perspectives view this?

2 of 6

Marxist Approach

Education is an important part of the superstructure of society.

Education performs two main functions

Reproduces the inequalities and social relations of production of capatalist society

Serves to justify these inequalities through myth of meritocracy

Althusser believes

education is an ideological state apparatus, along with the media and legal system - used to maintain capitalism and pass capitalist ideas on to the next generation

ideology happens using the hidden curriculum - informal learning of particular attitudes and values in school.

Bourdieu calls the means by which the w/c accept failure and lack of social mobility as "symbolic violence". W/C cultural attributes are ignored - society is created to benefit the M/C as they have a greater cultural capital.

3 of 6

Correspondence Theory

Bowles and Gintis - education serves to reproduce capitalist relations of production - the hierarchy of workers.

Education ensures workers will not question their place in society.

What goes on in school corresponds directly with the world of work.

Success does not always = intellectual ability. M/C children do better because they are more able to stick to the system, whereas W/C are more likely to rebel.

People who don't succeed are taught to blame themselves for not working hard enough by the hidden curriculum - believe in the myth of meritocracy.